This week marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the baseball road for Pete Rose.

That's if you don't count memorabilia shows.

And I don't.

Rose is still just about everywhere these days, 25 years later, signing autographs on everything that doesn't move (and some things that do).

That's how he's made his living since he ceased being celebrated as the No.1 all-time hits leader in America's pastime. By traveling around from one rented gym or school auditorium or shopping mall after another, and charging people for his autograph.

That's so since August of 1989, when then baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti - with key information culled from a Staten Island gambling case - banned Rose for life and barred him from induction into the Hall of Fame.

"I have concluded that he bet on baseball," was Giamatti's succinct indictment.

The commissioner would be dead of a heart attack in a matter of weeks at 51 year's old, but baseball has not yet revoked his ban.

He is still not in baseball's Hall of Fame.

"Maybe they should lift the ban," Island attorney Eric Nelson said Monday. "After all, back then the information we helped Major League Baseball with said Rose bet on games. He didn't cheat at the games. That's what all these players are suspected of having done in recent years with the use of steroids: They cheated the game."

Nelson was a 26-year-old assistant prosecutor for the late District Attorney Bill Murphy in 1988-89, when the case that trapped Rose was being run out of Murphy's office in St. George.

'OPERATION SUNDOWN'

The inquiry was called "Operation Sundown" for some reason that's been lost in time.

Murphy's squad strung wiretaps across the five boroughs of New York, snaring a crew of loosely affiliated bookmakers with varying degrees of organized crime ties, who were running wire-rooms out of everything from hi-rise apartments in Queens to backyard garages in Staten Island to gated storefronts in Brooklyn.

Nelson was working under the direction of Elizabeth Foley, a more senior A.D.A. who would go on to become a state Supreme Court Judge.

MLB was conducting its own investigation of Rose and rumors about his gambling habits at that time.

Giamatti had hired Washington D.C. lawyer John Dowd to run the probe, and he had come up with some damning information on the then manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

There was a New York connection, Dowd learned.

"Bill Murphy and John Dowd were in touch with each other," Nelson recalled. "MLB knew that a bookmaker nick-named "Val" was part of the New York angle. But they didn't know who "Val" actually was."

The nickname sounded familiar to a couple of Murphy's detectives, who began sifting through the dozens of cardboard boxes of evidence from "Operation Sundown" that were locked away in a safe-room in their Richmond Terrace office.

They came upon a small green address book, half the size of an iPhone. It belonged to an Island bookmaker named Richard Troy.

He, they surmised from investigative information, was Val.

Inside the book were telephone numbers tying Val to Rose, and to his Cincinnati bookmaking connection, Paul Janszen.

That sealed it for the Reds manager.

He was done.

There was another Island angle to the Rose case.

ANOTHER ISLAND CONNECTION

A young South Shore memorabilia-hawker named Mike Bertolini became a Rose confidant, and wound up being the go-between with Rose and the local bookmakers he was indebted to.

Bertolini would wind up doing federal time on a tax case that grew out of the Pete Rose gambling saga, which is the way these things often work.

In 1989, Rose was a feisty 48-year-old who had every intention of punching his way into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown despite Giamatti's ruling.

And he seemed ready to KO anyone who tired to stop him.

Rose is now 73, with 4,256 hits a lifetime .303 batting average and 16 All-Star selections.